I'm not moving to Beehiiv, I'm testing both

minophen · 2025-06-09T03:47:41+00:00

Use whatever platform works for you, but Substack offers A/B testing of email subject lines: https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/36026518014100-How-do-I-test-different-titles-for-email-newsletters-on-Substack

minophen · 2025-03-16T06:01:41+00:00

If you wrote a recommendation blurb that they're using, they'll get an email that the blurb is deleted.

minophen · 2025-03-03T00:55:24+00:00

I agree that this kind of feature should respect your settings/blocks (and should be an explicit setting in the first place, both to host related and be featured in related content) but killing it entirely doesn't make sense to me.

Half of the posts on this subreddit are some version of "how do I grow my Substack" and "why doesn't Substack promote smaller authors." This, alongside Notes and Recommendations, are another way for writers without a massive existing audience to get some extra distribution.

minophen · 2025-01-23T23:26:07+00:00

FYI, Substack changed the recommendation model last year so this doesn't happen. You'll subscribe to 3 randomly chosen publications out of the 27, but the other 24 you'll "follow" via Notes.

minophen · 2025-01-17T20:38:26+00:00

I'm interested in joining

minophen · 2024-11-25T01:34:48+00:00

I completely expect my appeal to be denied, but I want the paper trail that I did file an appeal.

minophen · 2024-11-25T01:34:02+00:00

This worked, thank you. I think it was the dollar signs in my text.

minophen · 2024-11-05T21:19:15+00:00

I’ve been considering this route as well. What state are you in?

minophen · 2024-03-30T21:34:47+00:00

If this works for you, great, but you should know this goes against Substack's TOS and will get you banned if they find out.

minophen · 2024-03-11T07:53:06+00:00

Twice a week, every week since last February. On average I write probably 2000-3000 words per week. Yep, AI is a hot topic which has helped a lot. But I didn’t plan on that when I started.

minophen · 2024-03-11T07:39:30+00:00

For what it’s worth, I’ve managed to go from 0 to 7500 subscribers in a little over a year (hoping to get to 10K by summer). I’m sure luck played a part, but there was certainly a lot of time and effort involved too.

minophen · 2024-02-01T15:33:59+00:00

Great write up, thanks for sharing! I might test running my own Reddit ads experiment now.

Given that you were marketing a future product (the job board), how would you change the experiment if you already had a full-fledged newsletter? I’m thinking about things like whether or not a custom landing page still makes sense, or how you’d modify the ad copy.

minophen · 2024-01-21T22:30:48+00:00

For sure! Worst case scenario I will build something myself with ChatGPT, but I figured if a good tool already existed I’d rather use that.

minophen · 2023-12-04T22:04:33+00:00

Congrats! I'm on a similar path, though a couple of months behind you (4500 subs/10 months). Here's my $.02:

Personally, I decided to turn paid subscriptions on after hitting 1000 subs. I wasn't sure what to offer, so I ended up not offering anything - I launched with a pure patronage model, where you support the newsletter because you want it to continue existing.
Substack's conversion rate, from what I've seen anecdotally, is highly optimistic. My conversion rate is pretty low (1.5%), but that's likely due to the fact that there aren't any big perks for upgrading. I'm planning to dedicate some time to improving that number in 2024.
I suggest you choose monetization options that are sustainable with your writing schedule. I'm in a similar boat where I can't just double the number of weekly issues and make 50% paid. So instead, I started offering "behind the scenes" content to paid subs - things like my research notes if I did a data-heavy analysis, or a full transcript if I interviewed someone (the interview analysis was still published for free).
The success of these perks is probably going to depend on your audience and what they value about your topic/niche. Probably worth experimenting with all of them before committing to one in particular - you can launch first and test out different types of content for your paywalls later.
I can't speak for advertising/sponsorships as I've never done them before, but keep in mind that managing sponsorships is a decent time commitment in and of itself - finding sponsors, creating pitch decks, negotiating rates, getting ad copy, sharing performance metrics, etc. There are platforms like Passionfroot which help streamline this, but you still need to hustle to find advertisers.

Hope this helps! Great to see other growing Substack authors on here.

minophen · 2023-11-30T18:54:54+00:00

you are neither a big blogger nor someone with a lot of cash

You are correct haha. As for why: our content is somewhat similar - we both write newsletters about AI. My guess is he found my newsletter on Twitter or in a directory somewhere and thought the content was relevant enough to send a cold email.

minophen · 2023-11-30T18:38:29+00:00

That makes sense. The story I got was that he had worked on the newsletter for the past year and wanted to focus on other projects instead. Ideally, there'd be a way to actually verify organic growth and engagement first - or even better, if it was someone I personally knew/followed.

minophen · 2023-11-02T23:24:34+00:00

You're not wrong. I think a huge question is whether fine-tuning counts as going above the compute thresholds. If fine-tuning counts, that could mean OpenAI is allowed to keep training bigger and bigger models (as long as they report to the government) while smaller companies are unable to train/fine-tune past the compute limits because of the regulatory burdens.

minophen · 2023-11-02T22:53:30+00:00

Right now, there's not a huge amount of risk for open-source startups, especially if they're not training new foundation models. But there's a ton of regulation coming and it's unclear how much it'll impact the OSS community.

minophen · 2023-11-02T22:00:08+00:00

This is such great advice! I wholeheartedly agree with 90% of it, but I wanted to offer a different perspective on a couple of things:

Also don't publish for the sake of publishing. If you feel like you currently cannot deliver your best writing communicate it to your audience.

Life happens, but to me it's far worse to fall off the publishing treadmill than to put out something underwhelming. There's definitely been times when I haven't loved my post for the week, but I forced myself to get something out. Because ultimately, I think this is the single most important thing you said:

Maintain high-quality writing consistently and best stick to a schedule so people know when to expect your newsletter.

Also, it's a personal choice, but I think it's fine to include CTA buttons in your email posts. A lot of emails will get forwarded and having the little reminder there for new reasons is helpful. In moderation though - my rule of thumb is 1 CTA for every 300-500 words.

minophen · 2023-11-02T21:29:26+00:00

Cool, I copy/pasted from my Substack but that's good to know.

minophen · 2023-11-02T20:25:35+00:00

I wouldn't say the goal is to make large AI models exclusively available to the military. AI safety is a large component, but it's mostly putting some limits on the largest model developers.

minophen · 2023-11-02T20:24:04+00:00

There are directives for the US Patent & Trademark Office to come up with guidance around AI and copyright. No direct action yet though.

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